ESXi 5 Mac OS X Unlocker

Posted 06 October 2013 - 10:27 AM

MSoK

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Ka Hooli,

The Filesystem sizes are the default for any ESXi 5.x install, and I have never run out of space on the volume containing the bootbank files (literally hundreds of installations), yes on the log volume especially if the ESXi is installed to SD, then we relocate the syslog to a location on a persistent Datastore.

So I can only suggest reinstall (be careful if your ESXi is installed on your 250GB disk as you will need to preserve the OS Datastore, by default it deletes all that is on the boot disk) ESXi, re-run the unlocker,add your Datastores and import your VM's, alternatively install ESXi to an SD Card or USB stick and see if you have the same problem.

Posted 06 October 2013 - 11:07 AM

Ka Hooli

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Ka Hooli,

The Filesystem sizes are the default for any ESXi 5.x install, and I have never run out of space on the volume containing the bootbank files (literally hundreds of installations), yes on the log volume especially if the ESXi is installed to SD, then we relocate the syslog to a location on a persistent Datastore.

So I can only suggest reinstall (be careful if your ESXi is installed on your 250GB disk as you will need to preserve the OS Datastore, by default it deletes all that is on the boot disk) ESXi, re-run the unlocker,add your Datastores and import your VM's, alternatively install ESXi to an SD Card or USB stick and see if you have the same problem.

Thanks for the advise, ESXi is installed to a 2GB USB flash drive... so with what you've said in mind, I'm thinking of (1) shutdown the server, (2) disengage the HDD's (to remove the datastores with the OS and file share data), (3) remove the USB flash drive and remove all partitions with my laptop, (4) reinstall the USB flash drive (5) power on server & reinstall ESXi 5.5 from fresh install, (6) reapply the unlocker, (7) shut down and re-engage HDD (as they are simple-swap, not hot-swap), (8) add the datastores and import the VM's.

The current ESXi install had started of as 5.1, then upgraded to 5.1u1, then yesterday to 5.5. Not sure if that's had anything to do with it.

Posted 06 October 2013 - 02:09 PM

MSoK

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Ka Hooli,

Since your ESXi install is on a USB flash drive, you should be able to do a simple install of ESXi 5.5 choosing your existing USB flash drive, a fresh install will delete all the existing partitions on the selected (USB) install drive, and leave all the other drives intact. Once you are up and running install the Unlocker and add your existing Datastores to the new ESXi environment and add the VM's to your inventory.

It maybe the upgrade path from 5.1 via u1 to 5.5 has resulted in the full partition problem, perhaps uninstalling the Unlocker between upgrades may have helped, but I generally do a fresh install of ESXi rather than upgrade, especially if the ESXi install is on SD or USB (less risk of deleting important Datastores and VM's).

Posted 07 October 2013 - 06:20 AM

Rubyducky

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Quick note, I also could not get the console to work reliably similar to ipas. I am on ESXi 5.5 and am also using vCenter (5.5?). The console would work for a while, but then it would give the "Unable to connect" error on all VMs. I could not connect to the console through the web client, vSphere connected to vCenter, or even vSphere connected directly to the host. Restarting the VMs would bring the console back, but it would stop connecting again after a while. The host would also sporadically disconnect and reconnect to vCenter. Uninstalling the unlocker seems to have resolved everything. However, my other host running ESXi 5.1 and the unlocker but connected to the same vCenter server does not have these console connection issues.

...so yes, I've run out of space on the "/vmfs/volumes/d7e74ee2-3e936149-8a7b-27a1934ec1a3" volume which is "/bootbank".

We've run into the same issue with our HP based server as their custom ESXi image contains additional drivers which results in a large bootbank by default already. As far as I could tell the current unlocker script does not compress the built vtar file at the end, resulting in a rather large file to be copied to the bootbank partition. I was able to resolve this by adding an additional compression step with gzip at the end (all commands are basically reflecting what the unlocker script does and are relative to the path where the script is extracted):

Posted 07 October 2013 - 03:23 PM

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We've run into the same issue with our HP based server as their custom ESXi image contains additional drivers which results in a large bootbank by default already. As far as I could tell the current unlocker script does not compress the built vtar file at the end, resulting in a rather large file to be copied to the bootbank partition. I was able to resolve this by adding an additional compression step with gzip at the end (all commands are basically reflecting what the unlocker script does and are relative to the path where the script is extracted):

Posted 07 October 2013 - 06:46 PM

Thanks for that. I didn't realise you could or should gzip the vtar as the input file is a tar.gz archive. I will look into this for next version.

After quite some investigations I realised that the resulting file from

vmtar -c darwin.tgz -v -o darwin.vtar

is in fact a .tar (or rather .vtar) and not a .vgz file, although I would have expected a compressed file as well. It seems that vmtar decompresses the .tgz file but is not able to re-compress it again... somehow the syntax or the way vmtar works is not all that clear to me. To actually find out what is happening, I just looked at the provided files in the current bootbank and found out that these are mostly vtar files compressed with gzip.

Posted 07 October 2013 - 08:16 PM

Ka Hooli

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We've run into the same issue with our HP based server as their custom ESXi image contains additional drivers which results in a large bootbank by default already. As far as I could tell the current unlocker script does not compress the built vtar file at the end, resulting in a rather large file to be copied to the bootbank partition. I was able to resolve this by adding an additional compression step with gzip at the end (all commands are basically reflecting what the unlocker script does and are relative to the path where the script is extracted):

Posted 07 October 2013 - 09:49 PM

MSoK

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Ka Hooli, z.m_gmx and Donk,

We use the HP custom image extensively as the majority of the ESXi hosts we install are HP ProLiant, however since they are in production environments we do not apply the Unlocker, so have never experience the out of space issue with the bootbank partition. I will roll up an ESXi host using the latest HP custom image of 5.5 and see if I run in to the same problem Ka Hooli had and hopefully Donk can provide me with a new version of the Unlocker with the compress version of the darwin.vgz, and I will report back on the results, if that is of value.

I tried running the script unmodified OSx Unlocker v1.20 ESXi script, and it still had issues. But when I run zm_os's script above, it worked fine. I did add the command "BootModuleConfig.sh --add=darwin.vgz --verbose" to the end of zm_os's script, so to add the created file to the boot.cfg.

I'd say zm_os's script this worked because the files are being modified in the ../bin folder to where the Unlocker.ESXi file is. On my machine this was on one of the datastores (the OS one).

Now in the process of copying over my OSx VM image, and will test to see if it works fine.

At the end of the day, it seems with all your help I was able to get this patch installed. Thank you all

Posted 10 October 2013 - 10:47 AM

Donk

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Can you try this updated installer script for ESXi please? It should fix the problem by compressing the vtar. Saves about 60MB of space in the bootbank partition. Copy the text below to installer.sh, overwrite the one in the unlooker ESXi folder and then upload and run as usual.

Posted 10 October 2013 - 12:36 PM

MSoK

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hippoth,

ESXi supports OS X only on Apple hardware, thanks to the restrictions of the Apple EULA, so if ESXi is installed on non Apple hardware VMware do a hardware check for an Apple SMC and if it is not present disables support for OS X. The unlocker on ESXi removes the SMC check allowing OS X to be run as a virtual guest on non Apple hardware.

Posted 11 October 2013 - 08:25 AM

zm_os

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Can you try this updated installer script for ESXi please? It should fix the problem by compressing the vtar. Saves about 60MB of space in the bootbank partition. Copy the text below to installer.sh, overwrite the one in the unlooker ESXi folder and then upload and run as usual.

Posted 11 October 2013 - 12:17 PM

scacki

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I've just tried your modified script in a test environment and it appears to be working as planned.

Cheers,

zm_os

I was observing this thread and waiting especially for fix on ESXi HP custom image running from USB key. Now I patched ESXi 5.5 with latest Unlocker 1.2.1 and it patched successfully. But now I don't see additional radio boxes in vShpere Client (connected directly to ESXi host). I supposed that there will be new Apple radio box like on patched VMware Workstation.

Posted 11 October 2013 - 01:41 PM

zm_os

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I was observing this thread and waiting especially for fix on ESXi HP custom image running from USB key. Now I patched ESXi 5.5 with latest Unlocker 1.2.1 and it patched successfully. But now I don't see additional radio boxes in vShpere Client (connected directly to ESXi host). I supposed that there will be new Apple radio box like on patched VMware Workstation.

Did I misunderstood or I'm missing something?

Regards.

The vSphere client under windows only shows the feature set up to version 5.0, for the new options (V5.1 and V5.5) such as OS X 10.8 and 10.9 you'll need the web client (and a vCenter server as far as I know).

If I'm not mistaken version 5.0 already supported OS X 10.6 and 10.7, though. At least these two options should be visible if you create a new custom virtual machine with type "Other".